Sorry about the plethora of sky shots, but I am starting to really like it now.

The sun now has a nice halo around it.

This shot, shows how the sun starts to interact with the clouds, even in the middle of the day.I really like the halo effect, and the way thicker parts of the cloud actually occlude the glow a little.

The only problem is, that the cloud sphere is still single layer, so it is really paper thin, but now that I have got my head around this light play, I will bring in my 3D clouds too.I still have plenty of frame rate to play with really, so I'll see how I go with it all.

if (newPlanet->createPlanet(mCamera,"Baal",8,865365,1738400.0f,8492.0f,31,7.0f,0.25f,1,0.0f))

That's the call to create this planet.

parameters ....

00. mCamera = The scene camera.01. "Baal" = The name of the planet.02. 8 = The breakup of the 6 Faces of the planet into base pages ( 8 = 8x8 pages per face of the unit cube ).03. 864365 = The unsigned int seed for this planet.04. 1738400.0f = The radius of the planet in meters.05. 8492.0f = The maximum height / depth of the terrain in meters.06. 31 = the maximum split level to go to per base page of the terrain.07. 7.0f = roughness ( no Longer used, but may come back in later for base mesh augmentation ).08. 0.25f = persistence factor ( also no longer used but may shortly ).09. 1 = Has water on the surface of the planet (makes the routine add atmosphere and clouds automatically if there is surface water ).10. 0.0 = Offset from the base radius that the oceans will start out at.

I have to add in some stuff that I've hacked in, like atmosphere thickness and altitude and a whole gamut of others but it's getting there.

so you just need to calculate the distance the light is traveling in the atmosphere to the sun and red shit the larger the distance. there might be somewhere thats got the idea variables but I suppose it would depend on how far the atmosphere goes into space as different planets won't all be the same. But modeling earth should make other atmosphere heights. I wonder if it's possible that a planet would only get red light as it's atmosphere is so dense? I think it might be possible I'm not clued up on these things though

Thanks for the comments guys, and yes I think I will get the snow more reflective and red shift in the reflections, I'm working on a new terrain shader at the moment, and same with the cloud shader too, so that they take their color from the right area in the spherical mapping setup I have for the atmosphere.So you see, the lighting on the terrain is from the old scattering routine, and doesn't match the sky color at all.

actually it wouldn't be the camera it would be the point the light is hitting on the ground that is used to calculate the distance

AND the distance from the point on the ground and to the camera using the reflected light from the ground as base color. You might be looking at something in the horizont from high altitude, and thus getting more color shifting.

Just take a look at this picture (from NASA) where you get some redshift due to the light traveling first down to earth, and then up through the atmosphere again.

so you just need to calculate the distance the light is traveling in the atmosphere to the sun and red shit the larger the distance.

I hope its a spelling error, or else this planet will be quite well... shitty... during sunset

"It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away"

yeah you are right of course it would need both. I am wondering how you would cope with that though maybe to red shift based on the depth buffer but thats a bit ackward as it can only apply to the planet and anything in its atmosphere but not things outside like a space station. I think it might be one of these things that it looks close enough

That pic is what I am trying to achieve with my newest clouds routine, As for the red shift and stuff, I've looked at all sorts of routines for calculating this stuff, as well as a few of my own simplified routines, and the atmosphere itself is looking pretty nice, and very cheap to render, It is adjustable for all sorts of atmosphere make ups, thicker / denser , color bias to whatever you want, and it takes on the color of the sun light too.

The scattering will be what ties it all together, the terrain and the clouds, not to mention every object in the atmosphere, and outside to a fair distance (if the camera is inside the atmosphere). So I really have to make this calculation very cheap, and easy to manipulate for artists too, so the lighting and scattering will work together and not fight with one another. I want to see if I can get god rays and stuff (not too over the top, I really don't like that, they have their place) reacting with the atmosphere too, but in a believable way.

I'm still here, and still going, sorry about the lack of updates / news on this thing, I've been working things out with sovaka on the way we are gonna handle the procedural assets in this thing too.What I mean about procedural assets, is like space ships and cities and stuff, and the way we are going to allow people to build and modify their ships, their surface assets (dwellings, cities, roads etc).They will probably be built around primitives which will make up the whole, a prefab system as such, where each primitive can have a material assigned to it, attachments added to it, etc.I won't go too far into it just yet, it's still a work in progress, so I will fill you guys in when sovaka and myself have come up with a solution we are happy with.

As for the planets, well, I'm currently getting it to run under OpenGL as well as DX, all the while looking the same, and I'm getting the resolution of the mesh for the terrain increased to a ridiculous resolution, all the while not harming the frame rates too much, I'm part of the way there, I should be able to have a mesh of 500mm under foot shortly, on a planet the size of, well it shouldn't matter really, not the way I'm doing it anyway. This method will make integrating other terrain types allot easier too, I know I spoke / mentioned this before, but this time, It should work allot better and simpler, no silly hacks.

I'm also working on the forest rendering from high altitudes, I have come up with an idea for this that should work OK, I'm still penning out the details on this.The full planetary weather flow sim is almost ready to show off, I'm not quite happy with the way it flows yet, but the fundamentals are in and working.With the flow sim comes the clouds too, the ones I had from an old DX7 implementation I made won't cut it, but the new ones I'm working on will, I should be able to get the look of that previous picture that palaslet posted, well, I'm hoping anyway, the problem with the old ones, was that they cannot handle 1000 km long 4 km high detailed formations, where this new setup should be able to eat it.

So there you go guys, that's what we are working on.We'll keep you informed as we progress with this thing.

Just toying around with configurations of the planets, Water No Water, different sea levels, thicker and thinner atmospheres, having clouds and no clouds, all that guff. Just making sure everything works as it is supposed to, and is easily configurable.

Here's a couple of pics that caught my eye, of a Mars type terrain configuration, with a thinner atmosphere too.

Yes I know, and it does that too, Like I said, I was just going through all the variations of configurations, and debugging any silliness that might rear its ugly head, and came across these shots, that I thought might be worth a look.

It does look like that, and it is I suppose, but it really is just a cheap trick, as you can probably tell from the fps I'm still getting. If it was a true volumetric fog like some of these other guys use out there, I would have no hope of achieving that look at those fps. So don't pop your brain mate, it isn't that special.